Dropbox TOS Includes Broad Copyright License

mrtwice99 writes "Dropbox recently updated their TOS, Privacy Policy, and Security Overview. Included in the TOS is the following statement: 'By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service.' I think Dropbox is a great service, but what is the significance of granting them such broad usage rights?" Elsewhere in the same Terms of Service, which are a few notches above the norm in both brevity and readability, Dropbox says both "Dropbox respects others’ intellectual property and asks that you do too," and "You retain ownership to your stuff."

Re:So they wont get sued by asshats

[cgeys]

You might want to read Slashdot terms before making such statements because

In each such case, the submitting user grants Geeknet the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.

Slashdot (and whole Geeknet) license agreement is actually even wider than Dropbox, as they don't even limit it to as-required-by-service.

Re:So they wont get sued by asshats

[John Bresnahan]

Maybe I'm missing the point, but when I post something to Slashdot (such as this) my intention is to make it available to the public at large.

I haven't used Dropbox, but I didn't think it had a similar purpose. I thought it was more like a cloud-based hard drive.

I see a significant difference between the two.

Or don't use DropBox. Use Wuala instead.

[Weezul]

Wuala offers both encryption and cheap storage via data deduplication. They simply AES encrypt your stuff using it's own SHA as the key. And they use the encrypted file's SHA for the identifier. In this way, any two people should encrypt the same file to the same encrypted file, but nobody who's never seen the original file could read it, including Wuala.

Soon, we'll see the MafiAA perusing people's DropBox accounts to delete pirated content and/or sue its possessors. Wuala doesn't offer that much more technical protection here since they'll simply subpoena the list of people possessing a particular file, but they cannot actually just browse your account because each directory gets encrypted too and directories are usually unique. Also, Wuala is far more likely to fight a MafiAA subpoena because they're (a) based in Switzerland, (b) started as a P2P network, and (c) started by academics.